This can’t be the answer

| 10:46 pm EST February 19, 2020
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Thus far, tonight’s Democratic 2020 primary debate is contentious, spirited, and at times downright chaotic. There’s a temptation to get lost in the details and the haze. But the big picture is this: we’ve got four highly qualified and highly suitable candidates on stage, along with a billionaire who won’t release his taxes and a half dead guy who won’t release his medical records – and those last two guys are the ones in the lead? Wait a minute here. This can’t be right.

We’ve all pounded Donald Trump for refusing to release his tax returns and making ridiculous excuses for why he’s stalling. We’ve rightly used it as a basis for concluding that he’s hiding things so ugly, they’re even uglier than the worst that anyone would assume. We’ve also pounded Donald Trump for being in visibly poor health, even as he goes out his way to suppress his medical records, and asks us to merely take the word of some doctor who could be covering for him.

Yet now we’ve got billionaire Mike Bloomberg giving ridiculous excuses for why he’s hiding his tax returns, and we’ve got recent heart attack victim Bernie Sanders giving ridiculous excuses for why he’s hiding his medical records. How can the Democratic Party accept either one of these scenarios, when we’ve spent the past three years railing against Donald Trump for pulling the same horse crap?

These two guys can’t be the answer for the Democrats. They just can’t. Either one of them would be infinitely better than Donald Trump. But either of them would be far worse than any of the four real candidates on stage – Warren, Biden, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg – and shame on us if we don’t end up nominating one of the four.